They Field the Oddest Requests

They’ve been asked to find alligators and scorpions, cockroaches and butterfly larvae. They’ve been beseeched to reroute airplanes, chop off the top of a scenic mountain, even find a picturesque place for a suicide--all in the service of movie-making.

State and local film commissioners field requests from producers, directors and location managers from around the world--requests that often range from the laughable to the bizarre.

“People will ask for the weirdest things,” says Cathy Sander, project coordinator for Washington State Film and Video Office. “In the passion of the moment, their artistic juices are flowing and so they end up asking for the moon and the stars. It makes perfect sense to them. If they really thought about what they’re asking, they’d be laughing before I did.”

“Just about every request is strange,” says Joe O’Kane, head of San Jose’s Film and Video Commission. “It might be as simple as, ‘We need an outdoor cafe. But we need it on a street in a thoroughfare with the sun setting behind it and with a vacant lot across the street.’ They want you to tailor-make something that should be on a back lot.”

Nonetheless, film commissioners scramble to fill these unorthodox entreaties in the hopes that filming will take place in their back yard. Often, it doesn’t.

As in the case of the infamous scenic based suicide scene. Robin Holabird, deputy director of the Nevada film office, was instructed to find a suitable spot from which someone could jump--all with a view of downtown Reno, complete with the city’s neon signs and its inimitable arch.

“I’m on top of the Eldorado Hotel Casino’s new 10-story parking garage, and I start taking photos,” recalls Holabird, editor of Locations magazine, published for the Assn. of Film Commissioners International. “The security guard asks me what I’m doing. I say without thinking that ‘I’m looking for a good place to jump.’ It just pops out of my mouth. Then I had to explain.”

Meanwhile, Nevada film commissioner Bob Hirsch was once asked to recover “hordes of marauding cockroaches” to attack a character in a sci-fi picture. To fulfill the request, he hit upon a scheme to engage school kids, who were offered a dime per critter.

“We got coffee can after coffee can full of roaches--some adequately packaged, some not. Needless to say, we moved our offices two weeks later,” says Hirsch, who, when summoned to find scorpions, declined.

Hirsch also naysayed a director’s “monumentally absurd” plea to get Federal Aviation Administration approval for planes to stop landing for two hours so dialogue could be recorded at busy Reno Airport.

“Even if it were legal, can you imagine how you would feel if [your] airplane’s circling [because of a movie]? I’d be irate.

“The name of the game is to try to say yes as often as we can, but we do try to protect our staff and the public from crashing airplanes and scorpion stings.”

Frequently, desperate last-minute requests come in while filming is already under way. Leigh von der Esch, Utah film commissioner and president of the film commissioners association, remembers a British washing-machine commercial shot one summer on top of the famed Castle Rock near Moab, where hundreds of butterflies were supposed to fly on cue as the announcer proclaimed that their machines are “like a breath of spring.”

“It took so long to set up the shot that all the butterflies died . . . because the sun started cooking those buggers,” she recalls. “They were panic-stricken.”

Since it wasn’t butterfly season in Utah, she contacted the Florida film commissioner, who came to the rescue by over-nighting 500 butterfly larvae.

Another last-minute plea came from producers of a TV commercial who needed some “pleasant” sheep. “The first group didn’t take direction well,” quips San Jose’s Kane, “so we had to go to local farmers and get more sheep who were cooperative.”

In Humboldt County, site of shooting for Warner Bros.’ “Outbreak,” film commissioner Kathleen Gordon-Burke scored a coup by finding a bridge--Vanduzen Bridge--under which a helicopter could be flown for a key chase scene.

Earlier this year, Miami/Dade County film commissioner Jeff Peel helped Warner Bros. find and partially fund a 275-foot freighter to be blown up by Cindy Crawford’s attorney character in “Fair Game.” The sunken freighter became part of a Dade County artificial reef program to create a fish habitat and divers’ haven.

Luci Marshall, Phoenix Film Office program manager, was asked to level a mountain in the tourist-populated South Mountain Park so that the film crew could park vehicles near where the scene would be shot. “I thought this man was kidding. He was totally serious,” Marshall recalls, noting that she suggested that actors be shuttled back and forth on a van or bus instead. (The film was never shot there.)

For the 1987 Nick Nolte film “Weeds,” Ron Verkuilen, field scout for the Illinois Film Office, found a prison (Stateville Penitentiary, near Joliet) where a riot could be staged using inmates as extras--and even as guards. “The fight got a little out of control,” Verkuilen recalls. “A few guys punched other guys a little more vigorously than the scene called for. They were settling the score for real.”

Sometimes the requests are beyond the reach of even the most resourceful film office.

Illinois heard from an Italian company seeking guarantees for blue sky and white, fluffy clouds for its clothes commercial. A Japanese firm wanted rainfall specifics from Washington state--the velocity at which drops fall, how far apart they are and even their color.

Lisa Mosher, library manager for the California Film Commission, once was asked by the makers of a TV movie to find a support group for female serial killers. “At the time,” she points out, “there was only one [female serial killer] in existence that anyone knew of.”

And Illinois’ Verkuilen was asked to find trained alligators for a TV movie about the critters getting into sewers. “After I finished laughing, I said, ‘I don’t know anybody foolish enough to train them.’ ”